This dark Swiss-made, German-language/English-dubbed horror film from 1977 is streaming on Night Flight Plus.

Mondo Macabro’s video box describes the very NSFW Mosquito as “a kind of grown up fairy tale, albeit one that includes bloodsucking, eyeball evisceration and voyeuristic lesbian sex scenes, among a host of other activities.”

Mosquito begins with a warning:

“This story is true in every gruesome and horrible detail. It actually happened not long ago, and it could happen again tomorrow — in your city. Let it be a horrifying reminder to all of us that all adult behavior — even the most violent, perverse and frightful — is the result of childhood influences and experiences: “AS THE TWIG IS BENT — SO GROWS THE TREE.” The film you are about to see provides shocking but indisputable proof that this old folk saying is still absolutely true today.”

Mosquito tells the tale of a young deaf-mute accountant — he’s called “The Man” in the film’s credits — who is haunted by repeated childhood trauma.

The Man is played by the great Austrian-born actor Werner Pochath, who was often cast in low-budget European-made horror films to play sadists and psychopaths (you can also see him Dario Argento‘s The Cat O’Nine Tails, which we also have on Night Flight Plus).

At first The Man — who collects and plays with dolls, as it turns out — seems transfixed by spilled red ink before he graduates to the real thing: bright red blood.

We learn he’s been abused his entire life. His schoolmates savagely attacked him. At home, his sadistic drunken father beat him and even raped his sister in front of him.

As an adult, although he’s an accomplished accountant, he is openly tormented and teased by his co-workers, who even bring in a plastic sex doll to the office for him to play with.

At night, The Man can’t perform sexually or even find comfort in the company of prostitutes.

He seems to be particularly fascinated by a strange neighbor girl (“The Girl,” played by Birgit Zamulo) who likes to dance atop the roof of her apartment building (that doesn’t end well).

One night, he finally comes alive after breaking into a local undertaker’s funeral parlor. There, he begins his descent into madness after slicing up a pretty female corpse, cutting off her head.

Satiated and finally able to find some satisfaction for his blood lust, he soon begins raiding the tombs of the recent dead, using a knife to gouge out the eyeballs from one dead girl.

He also begins drinking blood from the dead girl’s throats with a spiked, double-pronged glass straw.

These desecrated blood-drained corpses become problematic for the local authorities, though, who now realize they have a modern-day vampire sicko on their hands.

We’re offering up original uncut air masters of Night Flight programming from the video vaults of the 1980s TV show, as well as provocative new selections from the world of music, documentaries, animation, cult films and more. Sign up today!

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Kuno Hofmann, the Vampire of Nuremberg

This was the feature debut of director Marijan David Vajda, who has since this film’s release mostly directed documentaries as well as worked as an assistant director on the Austrian location shooting for films like Nicolas Roeg‘s Bad Timing (1980), which was set in Vienna.

Mosquito‘s screenplay — by Mario d’Alcala — was inspired by the exploits of the real-life murderer and necrophile Kuno Hofmann, the “Vampire of Nuremberg.”

Born in 1931, Hofmann was beaten so severely by his alcoholic father — a convicted criminal who, in addition to charges of child abuse, was also arrested for burglary and the raping and attempted murder of a young woman — that he lost the powers of speech and hearing.

Hofmann had such a low IQ (70) that he was unable to find substantial work, and he ended up going from job to job, working as a shoemaker and a farm hand before he drifted into crime.

He spent nine years as a young adult either incarcerated or living in mental institutions — which he escaped from twelve times — and when was forty years of age he went to live with his siblings in Nuremberg.

By then, he’d developed an interest in the occult sciences, Satanism and black magic, with a particular interest in rituals involving necrophilia and vampirism.

In April 1971, German police and morgue attendants realized that someone was robbing graves, gnawing on the dead bodies and molesting and having sex with the female corpses. Occasionally the culprit also cut off their heads or gouged out their hearts.

That someone was Kuno Hofmann, who traveled from cemetery to cemetery on his moped. He soon began shooting his victims so that he could drink their blood while it was still warm.

On May 6, 1972, morgue attendant George Warmuth surprised him in the act of kissing a cadaver. Hofmann managed to escape, but he was later caught in a citywide dragnet.

All total, he may have desecrated more than thirty-five corpses, and in August of 1974, German courts had to decide whether to send him to prison or confine him to a mental institution.

Using sign language, Hofmann told the court he wasn’t a vampire, he was just extremely lonely, alienated and isolated and he had trouble having normal relationships with women.

He was sent to prison for life, reportedly pestering his jailers if he could have one last sip of a virgin’s blood before he was sent away.

About Bryan Thomas

Bryan Thomas has been a freelancing writer/critic for All Music Guide, and a contributor to Launch, Music Connection, Big Takeover and numerous other publications and entertainment websites, blogs and zines, most of them long gone. He's written more than sixty sets of liner notes. He’s also worked for over twenty years at mostly reissue record labels -- prior to that he worked in bookstores and record stores, going all the way back to the original vinyl daze. He lives in the Miracle Mile neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA.